Abstract
The creation of inclusive organizations can start in management education with lessons and exercises for current and aspiring managers. This issue of Management Teaching Review presents seven teaching resources, six Experiential Exercises and one Resource Review, for moving undergraduate and graduate management students toward creating more inclusive organizations. The objectives of these resources range from developing students’ self-awareness, to enabling students “walk in the shoes” of people whose social identities differ from their own, to designing organizational policies and practices to support greater diversity, equity, and inclusion. Along the way, the resources address pernicious challenges to inclusivity, such as bias, stigma, and harassment.
The first exercise, “Hear It Their Way: Micro-Invalidation and the Burden of ‘Articulateness’” by Monika Hudson and Keith O. Hunter, explores the unintended effects of seemingly innocuous comments. Reflecting on multiple readings of a short passage allows students to examine the expression of unconscious bias in oral communication as related to race and ethnicity, specifically communications that exclude, negate, or nullify the thoughts, feelings, or experienced realities of the recipient.
A common challenge in teaching about bias is to convince learners that they too have biases. In “Seeing Is Believing—But Is It Accurate? Eyewitness Lessons From 12 Angry Men” by Samuel Rabinowitz and C. Melissa Fender, students watch a well-known film that depicts many common perceptual and decision-making biases. Then they engage in a simple, nonthreatening, experiential exercise to discover that they use the same mental shortcuts as the characters in the film.
The next three articles explore work-related experiences of people with visible and invisible social identities. The first provides opportunities for students to develop personal strategies, while the next two explore the application of management best practices to increase inclusivity.
Maria Alejandra Quijada’s discussion-based activity, “Teaching About Gender Harassment: An Experiential Approach,” highlights relatively small incidents of work-related gender-based harassment and discrimination that can arise from unconscious biases. By practicing responding to common situations, students become aware of gender-based harassment and learn strategies for addressing it, such as deciding whether to escalate the issue, make a formal complaint, raise it with a superior, handle it alone, or ignore it.
Kathleen B. Duncan’s article, “Invisible Social Identity Exercise,” addresses dilemmas that persons with stigmatized invisible social identities, such as sexual orientation, religion, chronic illness, mental illness, or racial passing, may experience in the workplace. After role-playing someone with an invisible social identity and someone who inadvertently places that person in a quandary, students explore how to make organizational policies and practices more inclusive. The exercise is suitable for both face-to-face and synchronous online courses.
“Busting the Gender Binary: Activities for Teaching Transgender Issues in Management Education” by H. Michael Schwartz and Diana Bilimoria provides two activities about transgender work experiences. The first, a short, in-class experiential exercise, introduces concepts of gender assignment, identity negotiation, and the constituents of gender. The second, a set of scenario-based discussion questions that allows students to practice management skills in a new—and potentially risky—context, can be used in both face-to-face and online courses.
The last two resources explore specific actions that organizations can take to become more inclusive to facilitate, for example, a more diverse student body or a more diverse baseball team.
In “Identifying and Evaluating Schein’s Three Layers of Culture: The Texas A&M Culture Exercise,” Alexander Bolinger and Tyler Burch use a distinctive example of a strong organizational culture, characterized by commitments to tradition, rivalry, and political conservatism, to teach basic concepts of organizational culture. Students diagnose an unfamiliar organizational culture, evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of a strong culture, and consider how they might create more functional, inclusive, and effective cultures in their own organizations.
Last, “Challenges to Advancing Evidence-Based Management in Organizations: Lessons from Moneyball,” a Resource Review by Mark Cannon and Corbette Doyle for in-class and online students, addresses organizational problems that can arise from biases in perception and organizational decision making. The authors use clips from the award-winning baseball movie, Moneyball, to foster discussion about two opposite approaches to talent selection—one based on factors irrelevant to performance and another designed to implement objective performance-based criteria with processes that rely on evidence.
As diversity in the workforce increases, pressures to make organizations more inclusive also build. The articles in this issue can be used to raise management students’ awareness about bias and the workplace challenges experienced by people who have nondominant social identities, to develop personal strategies for dealing with harassment, to practice management skills in new situations, and to promote the creation of inclusion-friendly organizational policies and practice. Any of these educational techniques can promote greater diversity, equity, and inclusivity in organizations.